


char-dinh

by bodysnatch3r



Series: THE VOICE IS STILLED [4]
Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-10 16:41:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20854967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bodysnatch3r/pseuds/bodysnatch3r
Summary: They mourn her in their own way. His father’s grief is endless unsurmountable, and it is tied, blood-pact, with that of Roland, and it is tied, blood-pact, with that of the land. So they mourn her. So they lose and they learn how to lose.





	char-dinh

Her voice against the glass. An echo, and then the ache, and then laughter, only the laughter, the wind-chimes in her own throat that had been filled too long, too much, with black blood. There is little left in Steven’s hands but this: ash for the dead, ash of the dead. 

He did not see the guns go off nor heard them, he did not find her alive but found him, found Roland, his hands stained in her blood for-ever, and the fear, the holy terror on his boy’s face, the eyes blue like his, the eyes unable to understand. A child. A sudden, terror-drowned child, holding guns too big for his heart, too terrible, too cruel. And exact, merciless art, that of killing: no way to take it back, no way to correct it, no way to give breath and light back to the dead. And so Roland, who had felt the pain of death already in Mejis, had learned the final and terrible lesson. That the guns were blood-thirsty, that with them in his hands his heart would wither and then burn. That to keep a heart alive in such a chest was a work of monstrous, terrible effort. That without it the Tower was as good as lost. 

Roland, who’d taken the guns, Roland, too young to take them but gripping them anyway, god-given, blood of his blood, a rage in him that had propelled his hands and David forward, into the ruins of the sandalwood grips that were his birthright. Roland, a murderer, Roland, a child. He had seen his boy, and he had seen his boy’s mother on the ground, dying and then dead before he could say anything at all. No space for forgiveness asked or given. 

So this: his son having to kill his heart for good, and pick out the heart of the hawk from the remnants of his humanity, defunct. A holy violence, a violence built on love. Foundations, bloodied. A Tower, unending and unyielding. Love in its most raw, most terrible form: a love that accepts no compromise, that demands the death of itself.

It had been three days. The pain, despite himself, or perhaps because of what he knew, now, had been told by Gabrielle in a letter he’d burned after reading and now carried inside him like broken glass under his skin, the pain had dug a cavern in his chest. Annihilated the thoughts that were born, the soft songs of spring just around the corner, drowned them in a shame and a rage he could not begin to even name, let alone listen to or nurse back to health. And the agony had grown, like cancer, become nearly paralysing, and it had made his coldness into a weapon and a shield. Kings do not tremble. He closes his eyes in a study too cold for himself but cold enough for the noose around his neck. Tightened. Tighter. Farson holds the other end and pulls every day a little bit more, until, Steven knows, he will never be able to breathe again. Still, now he can swallow. He can swallow and inhale to catch the breath after, and that will have to be enough until the war is over or he is dead or both. 

He traces two knuckles along the spines of books which have not been read in years. Winter has come: in his face, in those blue eyes he cursed his son with, in the bones of his body. Beneath the ice, the pain festers, but above water, in the sun, he is silent. A lake with no wind to move it. Ice with no song to sing. 

There is a knock on his door and he knows who, even before the voice behind the wood. Perhaps he recognised the falling of the footsteps. Perhaps blood recognises blood, like hounds kept tight in a cage.

“Come in.”

The door opens. In the corner of his eye, Gabrielle does not stir from her spot beside the unlit fireplace. 

“Father.”

Roland speaks the word, and he is afraid of the weight it will carry. It comes, unbidden, hoists the generations upon its back. Behind him, his mother grips his shoulder and blood pours from her mouth into the collar of his shirt. They are torn and tied together by this shared horror, this ghost that will howl and howl until the day they die, this woman who drowned to spare them death. She swallowed, saltwater and spit, and what she vomited back into their hands did not carry a name nor a purpose. The horror is the greatest ache of all: the meaninglessness he holds with him, now, the death it was not his place to give and yet he did, he had, he has. _Ka_. A cruel comfort, a bitter one. In time he will learn all her bones, all the minutiae of _ka_’s skeleton, and the bones will become his. He will have cracked them to find marrow, a marrow like bitter wine, the only kind he could bear to get drunk on. 

A wine only his kind can drink. A wine, like blood, that no one but a gunslinger could ever understand again, or spell, or use to nurse a heart too broken to be human. It is in the time between his father hearing him and his father turning around that he decides he will not weep, even if the rage he feels is such a sharp pain, and it surges in his chest to the edge of his throat, like too much bile or too little air. He sees his father, and he will not weep. Instead he salutes him, looks at the floor for enough time not to drown, and then looks to his father again. 

“Is it time?” his father asks. The voice comes from deep underground. From somewhere Roland cannot walk through, like fields or an orchard he is forbidden to even find. He stands on the outskirts of his father’s bramble bushes, and can only guess their shape, can only sense it through the shape of the barrels of his guns. He clutches two branches: one for Susan, and one for Gabrielle. It will not be long before it is dozens, and hundreds, and thousands. They will cut through his skin and his muscles. Steven will gift them to him without speech: destiny, birthright. To be _dinh_ is to be alone, and connected, an island amongst waves of red, the linchpin.

“Yes.”

In black, they both stand at the end of each other’s grief. It ends where the other’s face begins. Roland sees a coldness he cannot understand, a love he has mistaken for apathy, a rage he has never seen become so much pain. So much pain it scares him away from his own fragility. Enough pain to let him wonder, briefly, how he has not been sent West for what he’s done.

And across the room in the shadow of the world outside, Steven Deschain sees all of his pain reflected in his dead wife’s features. He sees a weapon, exact and terrible, beginning to form, and he sees a creature as alone as he is, as close to the heart of the world and its song. In black, they sit at the heart of each other’s grief: two lonely men, having to learn how to nurse each other’s loneliness.

He slowly walks towards his son, fourteen years old, both a child and a man. In this age he is between worlds: he is holding the guns, he has not yet lost the roundness in his cheeks, and he has lain with two women, and he has killed his own mother.

In a gesture, he smoothes the collar of Roland’s shirt. Underneath the touch, he is looking for a heartbeat, for a body still warm with bright light. A light he lost when he was young, sixteen, when he drove a knife into Cort’s shin and Cort laughed and yielded. Roland has lost it even sooner: at fourteen. To see kindness die in a gunslinger is no reason to mourn. Kindness is for creatures not raised to the gun. Kindness is for _ka-mai_ and their laughter. But kindness, dear or not, is what they must defend, and bring to the river to drown so that it does not drown them. Roland feels his father’s touch like a hesitant, skittish thing. Like a deer testing new ground, not newborn but not ancient, either. 

“We should go, then, Roland. Best not to leave her waiting.”

In the cold of his father’s study as Steven closes the door behind them, Roland catches a last glimpse of his mother’s dead eyes. In Steven’s dreams she screams, eyes white with the wizard’s dark magic. In his she is just there: her silence is accusation enough.

The door of his father’s study closes. Outside it, they walk slowly down a hallway and down stairs, love’s dead whispers chasing after them. 


End file.
